As our social and economic activities progress, the administration and management of parking facilities are increasingly challenging. For example, university campuses and medical facilities assign various levels of parking privileges to students, faculty, patients, and doctors. Patrons of transit stations and airports demand fast and convenient access to and egress from parking facilities in downtown and other activity center situations. Drivers want to quickly find an available space even when traffic is congested. Parking operators want to maximize the revenue and utilization of the parking facilities.
Drivers at a typical university or medical parking facility are mostly regular patrons. Drivers at the facility purchase a permit and display the permit from a parking administrative office to display on their windshield. An entrance attendant visually inspects the permit and manually operates a gate to grant access to vehicles entering the facility. Some disadvantages of such a system include bottlenecks that may occur at entrances and exits at certain times of the day due to higher volumes of traffic (e.g., morning and evening peak hours). Furthermore, it is often difficult for attendants to quickly inspect permits for compliance with facilities having various levels of parking privileges.
Drivers at a typical airport or transit parking facility approach a gated entrance of the parking facility, stop their car, and take a magnetic ticket from a dispenser which causes the gate to open allowing the car to enter. The ticket may include a time and a gate entrance recorded on it. When leaving, the driver hands the magnetic ticket to an attendant to calculate parking fee, and pays with cash or a credit card. This system requires the driver to stop twice at the facility (to receive the ticket and pay for parking) which is, among other things, inconvenient to the driver and labor intensive.
Drivers at a typical downtown parking facility pay fees to attendants at the entrance or an exit. The entrance is blocked or a sign is displayed when the lot is full which has its disadvantages. For example, a driver en route to the facility has no way to know whether a parking space will be available upon reaching the parking facility. If the parking facility is full, the driver also has no way to determine which nearby parking facility has available spaces. As a result, the driver must continue to drive randomly around until a space is located. This is particularly frustrating to drivers on congested city streets.
Recently, RFID technology has started to be employed for use in parking facilities. One significant advantage of RFID systems is the potential expedience of hands-free use of the parking facility. However, many conventional implementations have used active RFID tags that have long read ranges and are therefore not suitable for parking management. For example, issues with RF signal interference caused by the long read ranges have resulted in problems for smooth facility operation. Other conventional implementations using passive RFID tags require a driver to stop near a sensor at a gate to read the RFID tag due to the limited ability of such systems to read data beyond short range.
Current systems of managing parking facilities are, among other things, inconvenient for drivers, expensive to operate, and underutilize the parking facility. Therefore, improvements continue to be developed for parking facility technology.